Beginning(s), with Gormenghast!

Okay. I’ve spent a bit of time on social media. I’ve learnt loads and followed many beautiful links, discovering art, writers, history and ideas that might otherwise have remained, for me, uncharted. That’s a thing that I like about social media: cultural media. (Teachers: SMCS!)

This looks like it could be a good platform for someone who loves to read and learn. So I’m going to blog on here rather than on the platforms I’ve used before.

I plan to post once a day. I imagine these posts are going to inspire, support, and warm hundreds of literary heart-cockles. Do let me know if one of them ever does!

Tomorrow I’ll say a little more about the work I am doing with my publishing company. Posts will also on occasions (possibly on most occasions actually) be shared quotations from existing, or pre-publication, literature. I’m going to start today with a sentence from the opening of one of my favourite books, ‘Titus Groan’ by Mervyn Peake (I quote from memory I’m afraid, so the punctuation might not be reliable!):

[Gormenghast’s] tower arose, like a mutilated finger, from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.

When I had my admissions interviews at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge the interviewing Director of Studies asked me about my favourite novel. I told him it was ‘Gormenghast’. He said he’d not read it, because it seemed ‘rather long’.